Camden , Maine -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Want to help save the humpback whale ? Pick up a camera and start taking pictures , says Gale McCullough , a `` fluke matcher '' at Allied Whale , a research group .

McCullough is a citizen scientist -- a do-goodery term for volunteers who help collect data about the natural world -- who uses the photo-sharing site Flickr to catalog photos of whales . Not just any photos , though . She 's specifically interested in the humpback 's fluke , or the tail . On humpbacks , the underside of the fluke carries unique identifying information in the form of a splotchy black and white pattern . This can be used to tell one whale from another , much the way fingerprints work for humans .

McCullough spends time looking through these whale-tail photos and matching them to each other . Combining that data with dates , she and other scientists can track a particular whale 's movement over time , giving each of these enormous marine mammals a story that otherwise would be unknown .

To learn more about the whales , however , more photos are needed .

`` If you go whale watching , take a camera , '' she said in an interview on a boat off the coast of Maine , where she was speaking to a group of people attending the annual PopTech conference . `` And then put it on Flickr . I 'll find it . ''

The conclusions scientists draw from these amateur photos are not insignificant .

Last year , for example , McCullough -- a spry , gray-haired woman who wears tinted glasses that nearly cover her face and an orange jacket bright enough to make onlookers wish they had tinted lenses of their own -- did a casual Flickr search and noticed that a particular humpback whale , No. 1363 in the official whale catalog , had been spotted by a man who was on vacation in Madagascar . Two years before that photo was taken , the same whale was seen off the coast of Brazil , some 6,000 miles away .

That migration route was longer than any that had been recorded for a single humpback , according to a journal article that cited the finding .

`` This observation is altogether unprecedented , '' Peter Stevick , a marine biologist at College of the Atlantic , and author of that article , told Wired Science . `` There are only a few humpback whales that have been seen in more than one breeding ground before this , and they moved to relatively nearby areas -- eastern to western Australia , eastern to western Africa , for example . ''

`` We have to rearrange the way we feel about the ocean now , '' McCullough said in 2010 .

With more photos to comb through , more discoveries could be made , she said .

She encouraged anyone who goes on a whale-watching trip to try to take photographs of the whale 's fluke . Wait much longer than you think you should to click the shutter , though , because the fluke becomes visible just before the whale dives back down into the ocean , she said .

If you upload the photos to a public photo-sharing website -- Flickr is just one of many -- and tag them with a date and location , then scientists may be able to use that photo to track the whale on its journeys through the ocean .

McCullough said photos of whales in South Africa and Madagascar are particularly needed .

Taking a photo of a whale can be the start of a lifelong learning experience , she said .

`` Whales are a great way to take people down into the ocean . ''

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Volunteers match and analyze whale photos on Flickr

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Citizen scientist discovers record migration on photo-sharing site

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Gale McCullough : More whale photos could lead to new findings

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Researchers need photos of the underside of whales ' tails , or flukes